It is well known that the human body is incredibly adaptive and will continuously adapt and adjust to its environment. This adaptive ability is sometimes referred to as a correlative adaptive physiological response.
Our cultural transition to becoming a primarily sedentary population has been developing respectively as we have moved toward a more informational based economy. As a result, people find themselves spending an ever-increasing amount of time in various types of seated/sedentary environments. While transcending the more physically arduous labor intensive lifestyles of previous agricultural industrial generations, this cultural transition has yielded some undesired human physiological adaptations.
Research directed towards studying the adverse physiological effects of this sedentary shift clearly indicates that a chronically sedentary lifestyle increases the risk of conditions like obesity, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension.
What is perhaps less obvious is that a primarily sedentary lifestyle also affects our ability to adequately support our center bodies. At least in part, this systemic deactivation of our center body support system (i.e., our “core” muscles) is evidenced by the more than 100 billion dollars spent annually in this country to treat spine related disorders.
More specifically, prolonged artificial stabilization of the pelvis and/or spine, by sitting in a chair for example, deactivates the “inner unit”, i.e., the very muscles designed to support the body's spine. For purposes of this specification, the term “inner unit” refers to the set of muscles that provides center body foundational support (i.e., the pelvic floor, diaphragm, transverse abdominus, internal oblique, multifidus). Likewise, the term “outer unit” refers to the muscles that move the center body (i.e., rectus abdominus, external oblique, latissimus dorsi). Together, the inner unit and the outer unit comprise what is known in the art as the body's “core.”
While methods for strengthening the “outer unit” are well known in the art and effective, methods for strengthening the “inner unit” tend to be difficult for the user to perform correctly. As a result, users of the presently known methods for training the inner unit typically fail to activate, optimally strengthen, or “re-educate” the user's inner unit.
Among other things, none of today's currently accepted methods for re-educating or optimizing core function via the deep spinal stabilizers have proven equal to the task of meeting the needs of an ever increasingly sedentary population. More specifically, current bridging and bracing techniques, standing functional trainers, and traditionally designed exercise equipment simply fail to meet the mandated activation criteria compulsory for re-educating the deep spinal stabilizers of the inner unit. The inherent vertical user orientation of standing functional trainers (while having some functional merit) promote compressive spinal loading, which also does not mandate optimal activation and should be avoided until users have acquired the necessary “inner unit” strength to resist compressive loads.
Lastly, traditionally designed exercise equipment fails entirely because such equipment artificially stabilizes a user's pelvis and/or spine during various types of upper extremity force production. Artificial stabilization of the pelvis/spine is completely antithetical to optimizing core function, as being chronically sedentary is the primary culprit for the weakening of our center bodies. These prior art strategies have proven only to perpetuate an already per-existing imbalance between our body's core and our extremities.
What is needed is an exercise system that is capable of inherently optimizing core function and thereby effectively counterbalancing the undesired physiological effects of living in a primarily sedentary culture.